Antidote: Oliver Burkeman (2011)

Positive thinking, Optimism, hankering over Self Esteem etc are all bunk, says Oliver Burkeman. 

They are no keys to everlasting happiness, he says. Sure they pep you up a bit and make you feel good ephemerally; but when the chips are really down and you are staring down the barrel, platitudes on Optimism and Positivity fall flat. And therafter, he says, it’s a downward spiral.

Burkeman suggests an alternate path to happiness in his ‘Antidote’; the book claiming to be a bracing detox for the self-help junkie’. It draws heavily from the Stoics, new age guru’s like Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts.
The path suggested is sometimes thought provoking; but is it something radical and off the clichéd path?

He starts off radically enough, with an alternative take on happiness:

Is happiness really a goal worth pursuing?

There are good reasons to believe that the whole notion of ‘seeking happiness’ is flawed to begin with. For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce.

Interesting.

But the Author doesn’t pursue this thought. Happiness is a worthwhile goal, he decides. And the book is all about an attempt to chalk out a path to happiness. 

Stoics

He starts with the Stoics take on happiness.                                                               


Live virtuously in accordance with reason, said the Stoics.

This will lead to inner tranquility - ‘a state of mind, marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy’.

And how do you achieve tranquility? Not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances.

One way to do this, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.

The Stoics say it is not people, situations, or events that make us sad, anxious, or angry. These external ‘events’  are not ‘negative’ in itself – In fact, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all.

As Shakespeare had Hamlet say ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.

The Stoics propose a radical methodology to deal with the possibility of things going wrong. Rather than struggling to avoid all thought of worst-case scenarios, they counsel: Just face it; stare it in the face.

They termed this methodology as ‘the premeditation of evils’.

By doing so, you will begin to savor things that you love. Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.

Epictetus proposed that ‘Each time you kiss your child goodnight, you should specifically consider the possibility that he/she might die tomorrow.’

This, Epictetus says, will make you love your child all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.

But for all their rationality, the Stoics had their own idiosyncratic form of religious belief.
They held that the universe was God; that there was a grand plan, and that everything was happening for a reason.

‘Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul,’ says Marcus Aurelius. ‘Whatever happens at all, happens as it should.’

So when a Stoic asks you to live ‘according to reason’, it essentially meant acting in accordance with this ‘Universal Plan’.

If you however, are unwilling to accept that stuff happens for a reason or that there is a ‘Grand design’ behind it all, then things sort of come unhinged.

But not for Burkeman though. He has become a convert.

The author says that even if you cannot accept the Stoic notion of a ‘Grand Plan’, you could still accept that ‘Each one of us clearly has very little individual control over the universe.’

But then in his amplification, the author sinks further; from ‘little individual control’ to ‘no control’.

To quote: ’….We habitually act as if our control over the world were much greater than it really is. Even such personal matters as our health, our finances and our reputations are ultimately beyond our control; we can try to influence them, of course, but frequently things won’t go our way. And the behavior of other people is even further beyond our control.’

‘….In better times, it’s easy to forget how little we control: we can usually manage to convince ourselves that we attained the promotion at work or the new relationship, or the Nobel Prize, thanks solely to our own brilliance and effort. But unhappy times bring home the truth of the matter. Jobs are lost; plans go wrong; People die. If your strategy for happiness depends on bending circumstances to your will, this is terrible news’.

‘…Those things lie beyond the individual’s control; if you invest your happiness in them, you’re setting yourself up for a rude shock.’

Actually Burkeman lost me there. There is a contradiction in what he says.

The Stoics are consistent when they harp on ‘equanimity whatever be the circumstances’, because ‘it’s all part of a Grand Plan’ and things 'unfold the way they are for a reason.’ Akin to ‘Destiny’ or ‘Fate’ or ‘Karma’. No problem there.

But when Burkeman takes the high road and disagrees with the notion of a ‘Grand Design’, as he found the idea difficult to swallow as a ‘modern secular mind’, the entire philosophical edifice of the Stoics come crashing down.

If as Burkeman maintains ‘Stoically’, that individual efforts do not matter, then what is it that matters?

If there is no ‘Grand Design’ and stuff just happens, who decides what should happen?

If there is no Cosmic Agency out there, nobody to decide what is to happen in my life, what should unfold in my piffling existence on Earth, then why should anyone stop me from doing my two bit to improve my miserable existence?

Burkeman says individual effort matters little. But how do you decide that? How do you come to the conclusion that individual efforts do not matter? If there is no Cosmic Agency to decide how things should unfold, then who says my efforts do not matter?

Empirically speaking, it’s difficult to arrive at a definite conclusion. Burkeman may be right or he may be wrong. Individual efforts might or might not matter. But it makes more sense, in the absence of a ‘Cosmic Divinity’ or a ‘Heavenly Script Writer’(if you accept Burkeman’s postulate), to believe that what you do matters.

If there is really nothing out there, no Karma or destiny, all the more reason for you to chin up and do something about your life, isn’t it?

Maybe what you do is the only thing that matters or at best influences circumstances to your benefit.

Burkeman believes that your individual effort may come to naught and cause you grief if things don’t go your way. So he props up the Stoic theory to brace yourself against the pitfall of things going wrong.

Winning and losing, I believe, are simply the mundane ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of life and I do not see this as a case to decry individual effort here.

You put in effort. You win; then good, if not buckle up and carry on I guess.

Non-Attachment

Burkeman narrates his experiences at the ‘Insight Meditation Centre’ in Massachusetts, where he practices the Buddhist ‘Vipassana’ variant of meditation.

This involves attempts to observe the mind; to learn to view passing thoughts and feelings as if one were a spectator and not a participant. The aim is to achieve a kind of Non-Attachment; the mind is seen to be akin to the sky: the sky does not cling to good or bad weather conditions, the sky just is. Similarly the mind just is, with all kinds of thoughts and emotions flitting on it.

But why Non-Attachment at all?

What purpose does it serve?

In the Author’s words- ‘It’s not clear why the rest of us should want to emulate him (Budddhist monks). Attachment,…is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren’t attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way- and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others - why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world?’

Burkeman, interestingly connects Non-Attachment to avoiding procrastination and sees it as a rigorous practical way of accomplishing worthwhile activities:

'You are probably already much too familiar with the truth that most anti-procrastination advice just doesn’t work, or at least not for very long. Motivational books, tapes and seminars might leave you feeling briefly excited, but that feeling soon fades. Ambitious lists of goals and systems of rewards seem like a great idea when you construct them, but feel stale the next morning; inspiring mottos on posters and coffee-mugs swiftly lose their ability to inspire.’

‘…..The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren’t really about how to get things done at all. They’re about how to feel in the mood for getting things done. ‘If we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything!’

‘…..The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things. A person mired deep in procrastination might claim he is unable to work, but what he really means is that he is unable to make himself feel like working.’

‘…..Most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They’re built, in other words, on a form of attachment - on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.’

‘Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes you simply can’t make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act.
……The subtext is that if you can’t make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can’t get down to work.’

‘Taking a Non-Attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn’t that you don’t feel motivated; it’s that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you’re procrastinating on as passing weather, you’ll realise that your reluctance about working isn’t something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it, you can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.’

‘It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’ or ‘feeling inspired’. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.’

‘….Rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones.’
‘Inspiration is for amateurs’ the artist Chuck Close once famously observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to Work.’

So ‘Passion’, ‘Motivation’ and ‘Getting in to the mood’ etc are desirables to get going; but not mandatory.

Makes perfect sense. Just do it. Whatever it is that you want to do. And the world takes care of itself.

But where does that leave  Happiness? Does this attitude of ‘doing sans thinking’ leave room for your emotions? I think not.

Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle is quoted at length in the book. The basic premise of Tolle’s philosophy is akin to  Advaitic or Buddhist philosophy, i.e Quelling of the Ego.

‘When we identify with the inner chatter(of our mind)’,Tolle suggests, ‘when we come to think of it as ‘us’…..The sense of Self that we construct from identifying with our thoughts is what Tolle calls the ‘ego’. And by definition, living in the service of the ego can never make us happy.’

‘Why can the ego never bring happiness? Tolle’s argument here echoes the Stoics, who concluded that our judgments about the world are the source of our distress. But he takes things further, suggesting that these judgments, along with all our other thoughts, are what we take ourselves to be. We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own. It sustains itself through dissatisfaction – through the friction it creates against the present moment, by opposing itself to what’s happening, and by constantly projecting into the future, so that happiness is always some other time, never now.’

‘..The way out of this trap is not to stop thinking’ ‘…but to stop taking your thoughts to be you,to realise that ‘you are not your mind’.

So far so good.

Then Tolle sinks into Advaitic theory:

‘Sit like a cat at a mouse-hole, Tolle advises, ‘waiting to see what your next thought will be’. ‘When you listen to a thought,’ he  explains, ‘you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self- behind or underneath the thought, as it were.’

The sceptic Burkeman does not buy this:
‘ …He(Tolle) seems to assume that when you stop identifying with your ego, you discover who you really are – that you discover your ‘deeper self’ or your ‘true Being’, which was hiding behind the fake self all along. But this kind of talk rightly makes more mainstream philosophers nervous. Just because you have succeeded in dismantling the conventional understanding of the self, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll find the ‘real’ one.’

Burkeman dismisses the core of Tolle’s philosophy but latches onto the underlying thought:
’….The optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to happiness is exactly the kind of thing the ego loves. Positive thinking is all about Identifying with your thoughts than disidentifying from them. And the ‘cult of optimism’ is about looking forward to a happy or successful future, thereby reinforcing the message that happiness belongs to some other time than now.

‘…Most humans are never fully present in the now, because ‘unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more ‘important’ than this one. But then
you miss your whole life, ‘which is never not now’.

What Eckhart Tolle expounds is ancient wisdom of the Orient.

But what if Eckhart’s theory of an ‘Inner Reality’ or ‘True Self’ is incorrect, and there is no underlying ‘Truth’? Are we simply a ‘bundle of perceptions’ as Hume puts it and is there no ‘deeper’,‘truer’ meaning to who or what we are?

Don’t know. No one does actually.

But to focus, in a limited sense, to the topic at hand of achieving happiness, it will be apparent that the core philosophy to happiness as suggested by philosophers down the ages, all hinge on some sort of ‘Inner Reality’. Whether it be the Stoics, Buddhists or Eckhart Tolle.

True, Burkeman derives important takeaways from each school of thought, maintaining his ‘modern sceptical mindset’. But is there something missing something here?

Is Happiness a Worthwhile Goal?

Burkeman got it right initially, to my mind. That ‘Evolution has little interest in your being happy’.

As a ‘Modern Secularist’, Burkeman would obviously be at ease with the Evolution theory. So why doesn’t he simply focus on cues provided by the Science of Evolution on Man’s true nature?

As a ‘Sceptic’, he should have focused on cold hard science facts instead of nebulous theories.


Consider what we know:

Man is today at the pinnacle of the evolutionary curve and have remained the dominant species for long. In that sense, ‘Man’ and not the ‘Lion’ as we romantically presume, is the true ‘the King of the Jungle’. Can any other species stop our march?

How have we maintained our dominance over other species?

We are dominant because Evolution has wired us differently.

Animals are wired to satisfy their ‘Physiological urges’ only. So an animal will be content to just eat, breed, sleep throughout its life; 

Just survive-that’s all.

Man is wired differently however.

Apart from Physiological urges, he has ‘Psychological urges’ too.

This ‘Psychological Wiring’ is what makes Man unique. It sets us apart from animals.

The base state of Man on account of this ‘Psychological wiring’ is ‘Restlessness’.

Man is a ‘Restless’ Animal.

Observe even a newly born baby and the truth is evident.

Man is born ‘Restless’ and remains so till the day he dies.

This is Man’s true nature. Of course the alternate theories expounded in the Orient, by Stoics or Guru’s like Eckhart Tolle talk of an ‘Inner Reality’ and do not see man as just another animal. 
But ‘Modern Secularists’ like Burkeman surely would see Man as just another animal trying to survive.

Unlike what the Buddha propounded- Desire is not the root cause of misery.

We are ‘Restless’ or ‘Miserable’ by nature, and hence we ‘desire’ to get rid of  ‘Restlessness’ or ‘Misery’.

And there is no ‘Nirvana’ or escaping being a ‘Restless human’ till the day you die.

What does ‘Restlessness’ make a Man do? Well, a Man seeks Peace. Till the day he dies. That is his nature. Period.

And Man will do anything to get rid of this ‘Restlessness’ or ‘Misery’.

Maybe create beautiful music, make great works of art, build bridges, fight wars, give to charity, become an Eckhart Tolle…

To paraphrase Schopenhauer:
“Pain(Restlessness) is its basic stimulus and reality(of life), and pleasure is merely a negative cessation of pain”.

Hence the crux:

There is no ‘Happiness’ or ‘Sadness’. Nature does not recognize ‘Happiness’ or ‘Sadness’. Only the ‘Restlessness’ in you, is the reality.

Religions which propagate 'eternal happiness' are talking of a state which is not ‘human’.

For one, it is not possible to be eternally happy (or sad for that matter). Secondly it is not desirable also.

I suspect the day we are able to rid ourselves of this ‘bug’ of ‘Restlessness’, we will lose our evolutionary edge or at the very least as Kant says:

‘Men might …. lead an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ.’

The Antidote is an interesting read. It provide practical insights for life; as to how to stride along the path where we eternally strive for peace and blissfulness.

Barack Obama : Dreams from my father

This book is impressive; considering that Obama was just 34 years old when it was published in 1995 and his Presidential dreams were far from the horizon. You get a glimpse into the man as he was before he put on political airs.

Obama clearly saw himself as a man of destiny. His unwillingness to settle, his idealism, search for inner meaning and quest for identity- all are impressive. But I doubt if he considered himself a Presidential hopeful in 1995 and hence the writing appears authentic.

The book was a result of an advance given by a publisher to  Obama when he gained some publicity as the first African-American President of the 'Harvard Law Review'.

It's  a long read at 442 pages and sometimes very self indulgent. But you press on as you know this man became the first African-American President of the United States of America.

The book covers Obama's life in three parts:

-His childhood brought up by his White grandparents;

-His community service at Chicago to uplift  lives of African-Americans;

-Return to roots to Kenya to understand his origins and identity.

The book could have been 300 pages slimmer I feel; just about 150 pages would have been fine; if Obama had  simply stuck to the main narrative. And make no mistake; the book is all about being 'Black in America'.

But Obama being Obama, sticks to detailed characterisations(even of peripheral characters like a co-passenger in a plane) and elaborate descriptions; which is nice sometimes, but then sometimes you just want to get a move on.

In his childhood, Obama is fed with glorified uplifting stories of his mysterious father, Barack Obama, Sr who has left his mother and moved back to Kenya. These stories leave a lasting impression and he has an ideal to look upto. His grandfather(mother's side)is the one who feeds him these stories. Sample one:

'And Gramps, suddenly thoughtful, would start nodding to himself  “It’s a fact, Bar (Barack),” he would say. “Your dad could handle just about any situation, and that made everybody like him. Remember the time when he had to sing at the International Music Festival? He’d agreed to sing some African songs, but when he arrived it turned out to be this big to—do, and the woman who performed just before him was a semi professional singer, a Hawaiian gal with a full band to back her up.
Anyone else would have stopped right there, you know, and
that there had been a mistake. But not Barack. He got up and started singing in front of this big crowd—which is no easy feat, let me tell you—and he wasn’t great, but he was so sure of himself that before you knew it he was getting as much applause as anybody.”
My grandfather would shake his head and get out of his chair to flip on the TV set. “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence". The secret to a man's success."

But Obama also had a role model closer home- his Caucasian  mother, Ann Dunham. She taught him the one  fundamental truth that mattered:  'There is no substitute  to hard work'.

While in Indonesia with her second husband, worried that the Indonesian schooling was inadequate, she used to wake up at four in the morning to teach Obama for three hours before she went to work and drop him to school.

And Barack was only 9 years old at that time! Here's how Obama recounts it:

"Her initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send  me to the International School, where most of Djakarta's foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to Supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a US correspondence course.

Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing (“My stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense:
“This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

Being a black in America; what does it mean? Who was he? 

Obama was obsessed with these questions.
He thought folks who tried to focus on their 'individuality' and not be overtly concerned with their race and community to be missing the essential point: As a black you can't forget who you are; maybe for a white, but never for a black:

"That's how Joyce liked to talk. She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her.
One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students' association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon.
" I am not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial." Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest  man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something  else.  “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice  cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they're willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that l can’t be who l am. . . .”

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce.They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective
Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white Culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and We're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the Woman in the elevator clutches her purse; not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives -although that’s what we tell ourselves- but because we’re wearing a Brooks brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.
"Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual"

There are other such vignettes in the book. For all his attempts to find meaning being a black, Obama was simply not the average African-American you would find in America. His brilliance kept him apart and his success is not something that is easy to replicate.  His genes;a brilliant  Kenyan father and a competent mother gave him a head start most other people do not get.
But Obama carries out a fair amount of rumination on this aspect when he recounts the reaction of his fellow community action members  to the news that he was going to join Harvard Law school:

'The minute I told him the schools I'd applied—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—he had grinned and slapped me on the back. ‘
“I knew it!” he shouted.'
“Knew what?”
“That it was just a matter of time, Barack. Before you were outta here."
"Why'd you think that?”
Johnnie shook his head and laughed. “Damn, Barack. . . ’cause
You got options, that’s why. ’Cause you can leave. I mean, I know you’re a conscientious brother and all that, but when somebody’s got a choice between Harvard and Roseland, it’s only so long somebody’s gonna keep choosing  Roseland."... I just  hope you remember your friends when you put up in that fancy downtown"

.....For some reason Johnnie's laughter had made me defensive. I insisted that I would be coming back to the neighborhood. I told him that I didn't plan on  being dazzled by the wealth and power that Harvard represented, and that he shouldn't be either. Johnnie put up his hands in mock surrender.

" Hey you don‘t need to be telling me all this. l ain’t the one going
nowhere.”
I grew quiet, embarrassed by my outburst. “Yeah, well . , . I‘m just
saying that I’ll be back, that’s all. l don’t want you  or the leaders to
get the wrong idea."
Johnnie smiled gently. “Ain’t nobody's gonna get the wrong idea,Barack. Man, we’re just proud to see you succeed."

.....I lit a cigarette and tried to decipher that conversation
with Johnnie. Had he doubted my intentions? Or  was it just me that mistrusted myself? It seemed like l had gone over my decision at least a hundred times. I needed a break, that was for sure. l wanted to go to Kenya.....

And I had things to learn in law school. Things that would help me, bring about real change.....

.....Maybe Johnnie was right;
' maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom  or crime or the shackles of your skin. Maybe, by going to law school, I’d be repeating a pattern that had been set in motion centuries before, the moment white men, themselves spurred on by their own fears of inconsequence, had landed on Africa’s shores, bringing  with them their guns and blind hunger, to drag away the conquered in chains. That first encounter had redrawn the map of black life,
recentered its universe, created the very idea of escape.....

Another passage recounts, rather poignantly the resentment shown by Mary (on the news of Obama's departure), a lady who worked with him at community  service in Chicago :

'Only Mary seemed upset. After most of the ministers had left, she
helped Will, Johnnie, and me clean up. When I asked her if she
needed a ride, she started shaking her head.
“What is it with you men?" she said, looking at Will and myself“
Her voice trembled slightly as she pulled on her coat. “Why is it
you’re always in a hurry? Why is it that what you have isn’t ever good
enough?”

I started to say something, then thought about Mary’s two
daughters at home, the father that they would never know. Instead  I
walked her to the door and gave her a hug.'

In Kenya in search for his roots, Obama captures what it's like for a African-American to be in Africa for the first time:

'And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes.....
For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as
just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the rent page of the
daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.

How tempting, I thought, to fly away with this moment intact. To
have this feeling of ease wrapped up as neatly as the young man was now wrapping Auma’s necklace, and take it back with me to America to slip on whenever my spirits flagged.

But of course that wasn’t possible. We finished out sodas. Money
changed hands. We left the marketplace. The moment slipped
away.'

The situation in Kenya, akin to any third world country, is easily comprehensible to Indians. The confusion that Obama recounts when he starts 'thinking' of money when in Kenya is simply a 'White man's/Westerners problem':

'The situation in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher.Clothes were mostly secondhand, a doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s younger members were
unemployed, including the two or three who had managed, against
stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If
Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid
them off, there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.

Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities.
But what did that mean exactly? Back in the States, I’d been able to
translate such feelings into politics, organizing, a certain self-denial.
In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help find
Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new set of sheets. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my new relatives imagined for me: A corporate Lawyer, an American businessman,  my hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the western world.'

The story of his father and grandfather is recounted in a great amount of detail and  Obama feels that he has at least partly answered a few questions.
It gets a little bit melodramatic though. The scene where Obama describes himself sitting amidst the graves of his father and grandfather and crying was total bollywood.

A few hundred pages slimmer and this book would have been one of my favorites. But of course it is the  President; and you have to give him his due.

Civilization - Niall ferguson

Civilization- Niall Ferguson(2011)

The question has surely vexed generations:

How is it that Europe, a barbarian land of negligible consequence in the early 15^th  century compared to the dazzling civilizations of the Orient, suddenly became the masters of the world 500 years later?

Niall Ferguson in his ‘Civilization’ brings forth compelling arguments and  lists out six ‘killer apps’ which caused the West to pull away from the rest, namely- Competition, Science, Modern Medicine, Property, Consumerism, and Work Ethic.

One might agree or disagree at the arguments set forth in the book, but it’s really a fascinating read.

The heights attained by the Chinese civilization and the Ottoman Empire in their glory days were truly awe inspiring and hence the precipitous decline is all the more unfathomable.

The Indian civilization is acknowledged, yes, but the reasons for the decline are not really dwelled at length in the book. One reason could be that Ferguson talks more of the world in the 10^th to 15^th century, and India, had long fallen of the pedestal by then.                                                                             

In fact by the 8^th century A D, the Indian civilization had reached its zenith and invaders were creeping up the Hindu-kush mountain ranges to begin the subjugation of the subcontinent for more than a thousand years. The Mughals revived some of the old splendor, of course, but as brought out in the book, the dogma of Islamic decrees made further blossoming of the subcontinent somewhat problematic. 

But consider the glory that was China, even in the 15^th century.

'Even though, the credit for Industrial revolution is ascribed to Europe of the 17^th/18^th century, the revolution actually prefigured in China.

The first blast furnace for smelting iron ore was not built in Coalbrookdale in 1709, but in China before 200 B.C.

The oldest iron suspension bridge in the world is not British but Chinese; dating from as early as 65 AD, and remains of it can still be seen near Ching-tung in Yunnan province.

Even as late as 1788, British iron-production levels were still lower than those achieved in China in 1078.

The printing press with movable type is traditionally credited to fifteenth-century Germany. In reality it was invented in eleventh-century China. Paper too originated in China long before it was introduced in the West. So did paper money, wallpaper and toilet paper.

It is often asserted that the English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull discovered the seed drill in 1701. In fact it was invented in China 2,000 years before his time.

The Rotherham plough which, with its curved iron mouldboard, was a key tool in the eighteenth century English Agricultural Revolution, was another innovation by the Chinese.

It was the Chinese who first revolutionized textile production with innovations like the spinning wheel and the silk reeling frame, imported to Italy in the thirteenth century.

And it is far from true that the Chinese used their most famous invention, gun-powder, solely for fireworks. Jiao Yu and Liu Ji's book Huolongjing, published in the late fourteenth century, describes land and sea mines, rockets and hollow cannonballs filled with explosives.

Other Chinese innovations include chemical insecticide, the fishing reel, matches, the magnetic compass, playing cards, the toothbrush and the wheelbarrow.'

But just how close the Chinese were to conquering the world in the 15^th century is evident when you consider the fascinating tale of the mighty Chinese navy in the 15^th century.

‘In Nanjing today you can see a full-size replica  of the treasure ship of Admiral Zheng He, the most famous sailor in Chinese history.

The treasure ship was 400 feet long - nearly five times the size of the ‘Santa Maria’ in which Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492.

And this was a part of a fleet of more than 300 huge ocean going junks. These ships were far larger than anything being built in fifteenth-century Europe. With a combined crew of 28,000, Zheng He's navy was anything seen in the West until the First World War.

In a series of six epic voyages between 1405 and 1424, Zheng He's fleet ranged astoundingly far and wide. The Admiral sailed to Thailand, Sumatra, Java and the once-great port of Calicut; to Temasek (later Singapore), Malacca and Ceylon; to Cuttack in Orissa; to Hormuz, Aden and up the Red Sea to Jeddah.

When the whole world lay wide open thus for the Chinese to conquer or pillage at will, the sea explorations were suddenly ceased by the Chinese.

In 1424,Emperor Yongle died –and China's overseas ambitions were buried with him. Zheng He's voyages were immediately suspended, and only briefly revived with a final Indian Ocean expedition in 1432-33. The Emperor's decree definitively banned oceanic voyages. From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship. The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea.'

So what lay behind this momentous decision? No one is really sure.

The same however, could not be said for the voyages that were about to be undertaken by a very different sailor from a diminutive European kingdom at the other end of the Eurasian landmass.

In Lisbon, the newly crowned Portuguese King Manuel put Vasco da Gama in command of four small ships with a big mission.

All four vessels could quite easily have fitted inside Zheng He's treasure ship. Their combined crews were just 170 men.’

So why was it that the 15^th century marked the beginning of domination of European powers and not the Chinese, when they clearly had all the advantages?

Ferguson maintains that one of the key reason was the ‘fierce competition’ that existed between the European countries in the middle ages.

When Zheng He embarked on his numerous voyages, trade was not the key requirement of the Emperor. In the words of a contemporary inscription, the fleet was 'to go to countries and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power ...'. What Emperor Yongle wanted in return for the foreign rulers to pay tribute to him the way China’s immediate neighbours did, and thereby to acknowledge his supremacy.

For Europeans, however, sailing round Africa was not about exacting symbolic tribute for some high and mighty potentate back home. It was about getting ahead of their rivals, both economically and politically. If Vasco da Gama succeeded, then Lisbon trumped other European rivals.

‘Maritime exploration, was in short , was fifteenth century Europe’s space race or rather spice race.’

So why did the Europeans seem to have so much more commercial fervour than the Chinese?

Ferguson maintains that it was because of the ‘disunity’ in Europe.

The  map of medieval Europe, show literally hundreds of competing states. There were roughly a thousand polities in fourteenth-century Europe; and still around 500 more or less independent units 200 years later.

The constant fighting between these states encouraged innovation in military technology. On land, fortifications had to grow stronger as cannon grew more powerful and maneuverable.At sea, meanwhile, ships stayed small for good reasons- to strike an ideal balance between speed and firepower. It was much easier to turn and much harder to hit than one of Zheng He's giant junks.

So in China when the central authorities decided that there will be no more deep sea voyages, the decree was implicitly accepted by the gentry.

However, generations of internecine conflict ensured that no European monarch ever grew strong enough to be able to prohibit overseas exploration.

On the contrary, the European monarchs all encouraged commerce, conquest and colonization as part of their competition with one another.

Another reason was that the religious fervour provided another incentive to expand over seas, whereas a proselytizing religion did not exist in China.

In short, the political fragmentation that characterized Europe precluded the creation of anything remotely resembling the Chinese Empire. It also propelled Europeans to seek opportunities - economic, geopolitical and religious - in distant lands.

The Ming empire had collapsed in the 15^th/16^th century as the turning inwards proved to be  fatal, especially for a complex and densely populated society like China's.

There were no external resources to draw upon. And that proved to be the death knell of the Chinese culminating in the ‘Century of humiliation’ beginning 1850 to 1950.

Similarly Japan too missed the bus of Industrialization due to the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of strict seclusion (sakoku) after 1640. All forms of contact with the outside world were proscribed. As a result, Japan missed out entirely on the benefits associated with a rapidly rising level of global trade and migration.

So the European powers were pulling ahead of the great civilizations of the Orient because of the material advantages of commerce and colonization.

The Chinese and Japanese route - turning away from foreign trade and intensifying rice cultivation - meant that with population growth, incomes fell, and so did nutrition and productivity. When crops failed or their cultivation was disrupted, the results were catastrophic.

This theory of intense competition does not explain why the Indian civilization also did not forge ahead in the 15^th century. India was perhaps more or less as fragmented as Europe of the 15^th /16^th century. There were petty rivalries amongst numerous principalities.

Possibly the ossification of the caste based society and the Islamic domination prevented any positive fallout in the medieval period in the subcontinent.

Similar to the dazzling heights achieved by the Chinese civilization in the 15^th / 16^th century, the Ottoman empire had also flourished in the 9^th /10^th century.

'The caliphate established by the middle of  eighth century, extended from Spain, right across North Africa, through its Arabian heartland, north through Syria and into the Caucasus then eastwards across Persia and into Afghanistan.

The Abbasid caliphate was at the cutting edge of science. In the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) founded in ninth-century Baghdad by Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Greek texts by Aristotle and other authors were translated into Arabic.

The caliphate also produced what some regard as the first true hospitals, such as the Bimaristan established at Damascus by Caliph al-Waleed bin Abdel Malek in 707, which was designed to cure rather than merely house the sick.

It was home to what some regard as the first true institution of higher education, the University of Al-Karaouine founded in Fez in 859.

Building on Greek and especially Indian foundations, Muslim mathematicians established algebra as a discipline distinct from arithmetic and geometry. The first algebraic textbook was The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing (Hisab al-Jabr Wal-Musqabalah) written in Arabic by the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi in around 820.

The first truly experimental scientist was a Muslim: Abu 'All al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (965-c. 1039), whose seven-volume Book of Optics overthrew a host of ancient misconceptions, notably the idea that we are able to see objects because our eyes emit light.

The West owes a debt to the medieval Muslim world, for both its custodianship of classical wisdom and its generation of new knowledge in cartography, medicine and philosophy as well as in mathematics and optics.

The English thinker Roger Bacon acknowledged it: ‘Philosophy is drawn from the muslims’

So what caused the decline of the Caliphate from being leaders in innovation and scientific progress?

‘The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world.'

Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.Indeed, it was blasphemous to suggest that man might be able to discern the divine mode of operation, which God might in any case vary at will.

Under clerical influence, the study of ancient philosophy was curtailed books burned and so-called freethinkers persecuted; increasingly, 'the madrasas became focused exclusively on theology at a time when Europe universities were broadening the scope of their scholarship.

Printing too, was resisted in the Muslim world. For the Ottomans, script was sacred: there was a religious reverence for the pen, a preference for the art of calligraphy over the business of printing. 'Scholar's ink', it was said, 'is holier than martyr's blood.'In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim 1, had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.

This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research.

If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.

The only Western book translated into a Middle Eastern language until the late eighteenth century was a medical book on the treatment of syphilis.

Nothing better illustrates this divergence than the fate of the observatory built in Istanbul in the 1570s for the renowned polymath Takiyiiddln al-Rasid (Taqi al-Din). In the mid-1570s, as chief astronomer to the Sultan, he successfully lobbied for the construction of an observatory.

Prying into secrets of the heavens was however considered  blasphemous and in 1580, barely five years after its completion  Sultan ordered the demolition of Takiyiiddin's observatory. there would not be another observatory in Istanbul until 1868.

By such methods, the Muslim clergy effectively snuffed the chance of Ottoman scientific advance - at the very moment  the Christian Churches of Europe were relaxing their grip on free enquiry.

European advances were dismissed in Istanbul as mere 'vanity’. The legacy of Islam's once celebrated House of Wisdom vanished in a 

cloud of piety.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, while the heirs of Osman slumbered, rulers all across Europe were actively promoting science, largely regardless of clerical qualms.

The Ottomans knew by this time that they had to learn from the West. In 1732 Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official posed the question that has haunted Muslims ever since:

'Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?'

So it was the turning back on science and innovation that finally caused the downfall of the Islamic civilization.

It explains the backwardness even today of the Islamic world, and the sliver of a state ,Israel, holding out against its hostile Arab neighbors is not really a mystery, considering that Israel is at the cutting edge of scientific and technological innovation.

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone Israeli inventors applied to register 9,591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was fifty and for all majority Muslim countries in the world 5,657.

Another fascinating conundrum is as to why it was the Anglo Saxons that has effectively dominated the world in the 19^th and 20^th century and not the Spanish and the Portuguese.

When the conquest and colonization of the Americas began in the medieval period, it was one of history's biggest natural experiments:

Take two Western cultures, export them and impose them on a wide range of different peoples and lands - the British in the North, the Spanish and Portuguese in the South. Then see which does better.

It was no contest. Looking at the world today, four centuries on, no one could possibly doubt that the dominant force in Western civilization is the United States of America. Until very recently, Latin America has lagged far behind Anglo-America.

How and why did that happen?

 The Spanish Empire - or the Portuguese – were not afflicted with the defects of the great Oriental empires. Unlike the Chinese, the Spaniards were early participants in the global trade boom after I500. Unlike the Ottomans, they were early participants in the Scientific Revolution.

Instead, it was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America - an idea about the way people govern themselves.

The idea was this:

Establishment of rule of law with the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.

In 1532 when 200 Spaniards landed in Ecuador, their ambition was to conquer the Inca Empire for the King of Spain and to secure a large share of its reputed wealth of precious metal for themselves. Whereas when another ship reached the New World 138 years later, in 1670, at  an island off the coast of what today is South Carolina among their modest ambition was to find a better life than the grinding poverty they had left behind in England.

The two ships symbolized this tale of two Americas. On one, conquistadors; on the other indentured servants. One group dreamt of  instant plunder - of mountains of Mayan gold, there for the taking. The others knew that they had years of toil ahead of them, but also that they would be rewarded with one of the world's most attractive  assets - prime North American land - plus a share in the process of law-making. Real estate plus representation: that was the North American dream.

So in Latin America you have the problem of unequal distribution of property itself.  For instance in post-independence Venezuela, nearly all the land was owned by a creole elite of just 10,000 people - 1.1 per cent of the population. Whereas in America, the percentage of rural property ownership, is close to 75 %.

So while it was democracy that flourished in America, it was dictatorship that took root in Latin America.

A fascinating read, it is almost a follow up to another great book 'Guns,germs and steel' by Jared Diamond which also examines the rise and fall of civilizations.